Fulldome was held back by two things. One of them just got fixed.
I’ve been part of the conversation around dome theatres for some years, through the International Planetarium Society and IMERSA. Less about the technology than about what the medium is for — and about shared immersive experience, a term COSM now appears to want ownership of, while also building much of the hardware that makes it possible.
Planetariums are over a century old; Zeiss recently marked its centenary as the company that first built a room where you could look up and be taught the stars. Dome projection is much younger, and harder than it sounds — stitching images across a hemisphere, then splitting them so an array of projectors can throw light onto a very large ceiling. My friend Robin Sip, who directed Tokyo Origami, is one of the people who pioneered it and kept arguing for it.
The question we came back to was always the same. Could this become ordinary? A dome in a shopping mall, or another screen at the local multiplex?
What most of us agreed on was awkward: the planetarium itself was the limit. Publicly funded, with a science and education remit, it constrained both what got made and what audiences expected. Most people’s idea of a dome is a school trip they took decades ago.
There was a second limit, and that one I felt directly. Seeing Natural Selection and Dinosaurs at Dusk in older projector-based theatres was the real disappointment of that work — low brightness, washed-out colour, no sharpness. You write for a ceiling and get a rumour of it.
LED domes fix that. The Omni Theater at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History was a 23-metre IMAX dome until they pulled it down and rebuilt it with COSM’s LED system; it runs thirty to forty times brighter than the screen it replaced. Footage shot outdoors on fisheye lenses at 24K and above becomes almost touchable.
I was there for the GSCA conference last year, and the trailer for King Tut — my orchestral score in surround — played in public for the first time on that dome. Some of what else was shown took me to places I hadn’t imagined, which isn’t a sentence I’d previously have written about a dome.
Since reopening, Fort Worth reports school visits up by more than twenty thousand and near-capacity weekends. That’s the medium working — and working with exactly the audience it already had.
What else a dome is allowed to show is not an idle question. The Matrix extension at COSM drew audiences at ticket prices well above normal cinema, and IP holders noticed — enough that it comes up with theatres and producers, and gets fed back to people wondering whether their older properties have an outlet here.
A museum has an image to keep. When I raised some of that IP hypothetically — cult following, R-rated, violent — it crossed a line, and I’d expect it to.
But the lines aren’t fixed. Some theatres are open, some aren’t. Michael Daut and Ed Lantz at Worlds hire theatres outright and handle the programming and marketing themselves; that’s the model behind James Hood’s Mesmerica, which has sold close to a million tickets across sixty-odd cities. Their filter isn’t ratings — it’s that people should leave uplifted, and what I was describing didn’t fit that either. What they didn’t say was that it should never happen. Each theatre decides.
So the technology has stopped being the excuse. What replaces it is a question nobody has settled: who decides what a dome is for.